In December 2022, I launched the idea, on my YouTube channel, of the Tiki project. An animated feature film (90 min) that would be done by the Blender Community. The deal is the following: Nobody related to Blender is getting paid to do the work. We do it because we all love Blender and when the movie gets sold to diffusers, distributors and/or streamers (Netflix, Amazon, Apple...), 100% of the profits will go to the Blender Foundation.
The response was overwhelming. At this point, more than 90 people are, or have been contributing to the project. We've received sponsorship from add-on creators, render services, production tool creators, mocap manufacturers and studios, hardware vendors, and even Air Tahiti Nui joined the party by offering plane tickets so we can do the recording of the Polynesian actor in Tahiti.
This is all nice but the most important is the community that is helping on Tiki. We have an international team with people from Canada, US, Spain, Indonesia, Egypt, Germany, Italy, Australia, India, Colombia, Switzerland, Hungary, Belgium, Greece, Vietnam and the Netherlands. From very junior people to superstars.
This talk will be about showing the work in progress but also about all the challenges that we are facing and how we can resolve them.
Tiki is about the community.
I'm a veteran hard surface modeler and GC supervisor. I've been in the VFX industry since 1995. Long time Maya user (since 1997, when it was still beta) but since Blender 2.80 came out, I just (almost) stopped using Maya and Blender is now my primary tool.